Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  I set up a secret bargain and reward system. If I could face a hard thing, I would reward myself with an easier thing.

  I started with my mother’s house, now forlorn, dark, and empty of her. One day two months after she died, I steadied myself, unlocked the padlock, and entered it. The house was freezing and musty. Right after Jane’s death, Rachel, Anne, and I divided up her paintings and furniture and they took the things they wanted to their homes. I had invited them several times to meet me at the house to clean it out, but they declined. The house now belonged to me; they reminded me that it was my privilege and responsibility to do with it whatever I wanted.

  The place looked like a family of bears had ransacked the set of Antiques Roadshow. Leftover furniture was randomly strewn around. Jane’s bed was still downstairs in front of the fireplace, made up and expectant, but random medical supplies were tossed on the quilt. The piping system Bruno had installed for my mother’s handgrips crawled along the wall and down the side of her bed. Her wheelchair and a walker were in the bathroom, as were a toothbrush, a heel of soap, a used washcloth, and her collection of threadbare differently colored towels that always drove me crazy (I was always giving my mother new towels, and they were always unused, stacked neatly, and presumably waiting for special occasions).

  My sisters and I had not gone through any bureaus, desks, cupboards, closets, or the pantry. The refrigerator contained a half quart of milk turned to cheese. We had not touched any of her clothes, books, photos, letters, or personal items. We hadn’t taken anything at all from the upstairs of the house. No one had set foot on the narrow staircase leading upstairs for three years.

  That first day, all I could do was walk through the downstairs. I felt my breath quickening, and then I exited. I sat in my car and tried to breathe deeply, remembering the lesson from my meditation class. My reward that day was the satisfaction of knowing that I had done something I didn’t believe I was able to do. I also stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts on the way home.

  I started visiting the house in the afternoons. I cleaned out the coffeepot and took one of my mother’s old Woolworth’s mugs off the shelf. I dragged a wicker porch chair into the otherwise empty kitchen, turned on her gas-fired potbellied stove, and sat, drinking coffee and looking out her window, pondering the same gentle view of the barn and the field beyond that we used to look at together from her kitchen table. I did nothing else.

  Spring came. In my mother’s back garden, the hellebore pushed up through the crusty snow. The ancient gnarled lilac bloomed purple. The days lengthened and the trillium pushed out their delicate triangular blossoms. The peony bushes, the iris, the clematis, and then the beach rose. Surely spring would bring its symbolic awakening. It did not. I only opened the back door to the kitchen in order to let the breeze into the musty house.

  Sitting alone in my mother’s old kitchen, two phrases came back to me, over and over.

  One was from my reading on Buddhism: All things must pass.

  And one is from the movie Tootsie: I’m going to feel this way until I don’t feel this way anymore.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Rising Tide of Things

  Like just about everyone I know, I am almost constantly concerned with what to do with all the stuff that litters my life. This is the perennial preoccupation of baby boomers like me, who have spent half of our lives accumulating things, only to spend the last half of our lives trying to rid ourselves of our things.

  Assuming that I spent my adulthood up to the age of forty acquiring possessions, my basic assessment is that I have had, generously speaking, about fifteen years to play with my stuff. This means that I have enjoyed more seasons with The Simpsons than I have with my possessions. Most people my age seem fated to spend our empty nest years literally emptying our nests, as we sort, toss, and sell, in an ongoing project that will last more or less until we either winnow our possessions down to nothing or finally go mad from mothball fumes and mouse droppings.

  Recently I had a random encounter in a supermarket parking lot with a woman I had gone to high school with. I hadn’t seen Pam in almost thirty years but I recognized her immediately and we stood outside in the fluorescent glow of the store, catching up. Like me, Pam had recently been through the loss of a parent, and like me, she was dealing with an extra household of stuff. She motioned to her small pickup truck, which was overflowing with boxes and chairs and black garbage bags. “There it is,” she said mournfully. “All of my father’s things.”

  Jane wasn’t a collector or a hoarder of twist ties or plastic yogurt containers or newspapers, like some people her age. But she was the keeper of over 200 years of family possessions—books, paintings, quilts, letters, documents, and photos—and she did seem to have a strange fondness for chairs. Her small house contained dozens of chairs: spindly chairs, which had been carried on covered wagons; sturdy Stickley chairs, which had been passed along from my grandparents’ generation; and chairs she had purchased simply because she thought they were cute.

  Jane had wonderful taste, and she loved her things. Until almost the end of her life, she rearranged her rooms in a way that was often surprising. The dining room became the living room, the little bedroom was transformed into an office, and then she changed them back again. When I was a teenager, I went out on a date with a guy who picked me up at our farm. My mother was wallpapering the living room in a deep red. One week later, he returned, and she was wallpapering the room in a light green. “Wait… last week, wasn’t this…?” he asked.

  “Don’t even go there,” I told him.

  This place was the home Jane lived in for thirty years and loved until the end of her life. This was the place inherited from her neighbor John, which was fated to her from childhood. And now it was in my hands.

  After Jane’s death, I spent many months visiting her house each day, sitting among the heirloom flotsam and spindly chairs and missing her. Without her there, the house, which I had always loved, was just a big box with a lot of stuff in it. Every day I would tell myself, “Today, I will just fill one bag.” But I was so overwhelmed by the prospect of any task that I did nothing but sit.

  I finally told Bruno I was spending time in the house in a state of acute sadness and paralysis. His let’s-get-this-thing-done quality is great in a contractor, but it’s not so great for someone like me, whose forward motion can sometimes only be measured in baby steps. Bruno has a way of behaving that he sees as urgently encouraging but that can feel pushy. I’ve never felt ready for anything, and I hate to be pushed. Stand me on the high diving board and dare me to jump, and I will hold my nose and gently bump up and down and pace back and forth and go halfway down the ladder and then come back up. I’ll play to the crowd and take a poll and call my lifeline. I will eventually jump, but it will be ugly, disordered, and painful to watch. But if you push me, I’ll push back, and you’ll be the one taking the dive.

  I derived some comfort from my afternoon coffee time in my mother’s house, but like the house itself, I was inert. Houses, like people, start to die if they’re neglected, and I didn’t want my mother’s beautiful old farmhouse to end up dilapidated like so many others in the area, with their great bones and mossy, sagging roofs.

  One day, eight months after Jane’s death, Bruno met me at her house. I had finally confessed to him that I didn’t know what to do with it. It was un-insulated, with ancient wiring from the 1920s, and the roof looked bad. “If you tell me to sell it, I’ll sell it,” I told him—and I meant it. My mother was attached to the house, and I was attached to her, but the more time I spent in her house without her in it, the more I realized that it was just a house. I would rather sell it to someone who would love it as she had than continue to sit in her cold kitchen, paralyzed and weeping.

  Bruno walked through the place, poking the woodwork and walls with his mechanical pencil, trying to find the furnace (it was in the cellar) and the entrance to the cellar (through a trapdoor cut into the kitchen floor). I trusted his judgmen
t and was completely resigned to his answer. Unloading the house would be one less thing for me to manage, even though the concept of “managing” was a reach, because truthfully I wasn’t able to manage anything at all.

  Bruno rendered his verdict: “This house is a gem, and you’re a gem. I would like to fix it for you.”

  Immediately I started looking at the old place differently. Suddenly it seemed to have potential. Bruno decided not to do anything too structurally dramatic: to only renovate the downstairs and to leave the exterior of the house exactly as it was.

  With a plan for renovation, I started the process of going through my mother’s possessions. This was a horrible, weepy task, made much worse by my effort to do it alone.

  I was just pushing things around, not organizing and not getting rid of anything but moving things from place to place. I would get up a good head of steam until the sight of a pair of my mother’s shoes would be so overwhelming I would have to sit down and catch my breath.

  My dear Emily finally took pity on me. She was living in my house on Main Street, working at the mall while she looked for a job, which would take her back to Chicago. Over a period of several weeks, we met at Jane’s house and played music or a movie as we attacked separate rooms with our garbage bags. Then we would drive our gatherings to the Salvation Army or to the church for donation. Doing this with someone else made all the difference.

  Freeville has a sort of sharing economy where possessions seem to float among households. I have had the strange sensation after donating clothing to our church’s biannual giveaway of looking out my window and seeing a neighbor wearing one of my coats. Recently, when our neighbor Dick Blackmon died, I was reminded that I possessed two folding army cots that Dick told me had been his and his wife Edie’s beds right after they got married. When I contemplate those canvas cots, I envision not only the times Emily and I took summertime naps on them in our backyard, but also their grander history as the starter marital bed for a couple who were together for almost seventy years.

  Emily and I managed to create some order by toting the broken-down chairs and box upon box of random things up the dark and steep staircase into the second floor of the house. These boxes, jammed with small heirlooms of lace collars and chipped teapots, ancient postcards, shell-encrusted saucers, and marbles rolling loose at the bottom, were set aside and stacked in uneven groupings while we tried to determine which were tchotchkes and which were treasures. We labeled these boxes “Trouble Boxes,” because, much like a junk drawer, the contents seemed to expand in volume and complexity once the lid was closed. Opening a Trouble Box would lead to hours of aimless sifting as I touched, pondered, and worried over each little object, until I finally gave up, replaced the lid, and left it for later.

  Emptying out a large hutch, Emily discovered a stuffed manila envelope labeled “Amy.” She called out to me, “Mom, you need to see this.” I was in the kitchen, jamming tea towels into a bag. When I walked into the living room, my daughter was holding a thick foot-long ponytail of chestnut-brown human hair. The ponytail dangled in the sunlight. Gross, I thought, until I realized it was my hair. Then I thought, Oh, cool. In the envelope was a note, which I had typed on New Yorker stationery in 1983 (at the time I was the receptionist for the magazine):

  Dear Mom,

  I finally cut my hair! No more ponytail. My long hair is now in a chin-length bob. The haircutter wanted me to donate it so someone could make a wig out of it, but I wanted to send it to you. If you ever want to make a wig out of it, let me know. I’ll sell it to you for a good price.

  Love,

  Amy

  Emily also found a copy of the following letter, written by my mother, typed out on her trusty Selectric and sent to me after she had visited me in Washington, DC, a year after my graduation from college. It alludes to an incident between us that is now long forgotten:

  March 1982

  Dear Amy,

  I just got your letter and thank you. We had a misunderstanding and that’s not a bad thing to happen occasionally since that’s the way, or one way, we learn about other people and ourselves. We have so few it seems more important than it is.

  Since coming home from Washington the tail pipe has fallen off my car, it only starts when it feels like it, and the turn signals have stopped working except for odd times when I don’t need them. Various people have said to me, “You drove to Washington in THAT?” Well yes, I did. And back as well.

  Last night I couldn’t sleep all night and got up at 3 a.m. to take a hot bath and watch “Daisy Kenyon” with Joan Crawford, which lasted until 5. Easter didn’t really dawn here. At 5:30 a.m. the power went out due to 30 mph winds and they couldn’t hold the sunrise service and breakfast at church because with both the sun AND the power out, what are you gonna do? You can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd.

  Yesterday [a neighbor] asked me to, yes, his latest wedding next Friday night, which will be at his house, where he will be married by Jack Miller, Justice of the Peace. I can actually kill two birds with one stone because I owe Jack $25 for a speeding ticket which I haven’t paid so I can pay him off right after the wedding.

  I have just purchased Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which is on the record player right now. I just love it. It was the background music for “Death in Venice,” which I just saw. It was perfect in the movie because there was practically no dialogue and the music was just outstanding for that story. Besides, supposedly, the incident behind the book was written by Thomas Mann about Mahler’s infatuation with a young boy on a train. Aren’t artists mean. I have read the Mann lectures you gave me. That’s a nice little book I will always enjoy having. It sits right next to my Selectric.

  I must go because I feel like I’m going to fall over since I didn’t get any sleep whatsoever last night. Until next time…

  Love,

  Mummie

  Emily also found an old, yellowed newspaper clipping from 1973. It was a picture of Bruno, from when he was a football star at Dryden High School. My mother had clipped and saved it in 1973 and at some point had put it into the Amy envelope. Jane wasn’t one of those people who are always clipping things out of newspapers and magazines. In fact, going through her house, this clipping was one of only a very few that Emily and I found. Why did my mother take scissors to our newspaper in 1973 and clip out a picture of the man I would marry thirty-five years later? I have no idea. But the clipping seemed a portent, a message sent through time, to tell me that my past and present fates were somehow braiding together.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Does It Spark Joy?

  There is a book that promises a pathway for people to tunnel their way out when they are buried beneath their stuff. It is called the life-changing magic of tidying up, by Japanese tidying expert Marie Kondo (the title of the book, which is all in lowercase, suggests that uppercase letters themselves are quite untidy).

  Flummoxed and feeling overwhelmed by the tide of acquired possessions in which I was drowning, I purchased the book, like millions of other people, and dove into its tidying secrets. The author describes her lonely childhood, when she, at the age of five, first started her campaign to make the world tidier. As I read this biographical account of her life and the evolution of her extreme tidying technique, it occurred to me that what Marie Kondo was really describing was her own lifelong struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. She describes skipping recess at school, where, instead of playing outside with her peers, she spent her time rearranging the books in her classroom. Garbage bags were her best and constant companions as she tamped down her anxiety by filling them in her quest for tidy perfection. After she had perfected her own space (“perfection” is an important concept for her), she moved on to her friends’ rooms and the storage lockers at school. Marie Kondo strikes me as a very strange person. I do not want to be like her. I also do not want to be like the ruthless and tidy monsters who follow her technique and roll their socks and stack their clothes sideways in drawers and who throw
so much away.

  The one useful takeaway for me from this book was the question the author suggests everyone ask themselves when looking to release the grip of possessions: “Does it spark joy?” Going through my mother’s things, I was able to apply this question, but I was surprised at how often an item sparked not joy but extreme sadness. Finding Jane’s briefcase, placed in a drawer beneath her typewriter, made me light-headed with grief. Both items were tangible reminders of how hard my mother had worked and how important working was to her. Jane typed her way into college and a career as a professor. During my visits over the years, whenever I saw her leather briefcase full of student papers, I felt tremendous pride in what she had done. I decided to keep both things, but I also promised myself that I would somehow box and bag my sadness and that each day I would take at least one box or bag for donation (unlike Marie Kondo, who seems to pitch a lot away, I’m not big on sending things to the landfill).

  My old friend Kirk traveled from Maine to help me sell some of my mother’s collection of bureaus, chairs, plant stands, bone-china cups and saucers, pails, baskets, picture frames, and assorted tinware. Kirk and Jane were close friends; the three of us shared a taste and sensibility about things, and we also loved and cherished stuff. He and I often laughed over Jane’s aphorism, My stuff never lets me down. (People, she implied, often did.) Kirk helped me to sort, tag, and price items for a yard sale. We had some business at our sale during the day and then left unsold furniture by the side of the road.